Living to Tell the Tale Read Free Page A

my mother to sell the house, and was contemplating the sierra snows gleaming blue in the first rays of the sun. A delay inthe channels allowed us to see in the full light of day the narrow bar of luminous sand that separates the sea from the swamp, where there were fishing villages with their nets laid out to dry in the sun and thin, grimy children playing soccer with balls made of rags. It was astounding to see on the streets the number of fishermen whose arms were mutilated because they had not thrown their sticksof dynamite in time. As the launch passed by, the children began to dive for the coins the passengers tossed to them.
    It was almost seven when we dropped anchor in a pestilential marsh a short distance from the town of Ciénaga. Teams of porters, up to their knees in mud, took us in their arms and carried us to the dock, splashing through wheeling turkey buzzards that fought over the unspeakablefilth in the quagmire. We were sitting at the tables in the port, eating an unhurried breakfast of delicious mojarra fish from the swamp and slices of fried green plantain, when my mother resumed the offensive in her personal war.
    “So, tell me once and for all,” she said, not looking up, “what am I going to tell your papá?”
    I tried to gain some time to think.
    “About what?”
    “The only thinghe cares about,” she said with some irritation. “Your studies.”
    It was my good fortune that a presumptuous fellow diner, intrigued by the intensity of our conversation, wanted to know my reasons. My mother’s immediate response not only intimidated me somewhat but also surprised me, for she was a woman who kept jealous watch over her private life.
    “He wants to be a writer,” she said.
    “A goodwriter can earn good money,” the man replied in all seriousness. “Above all if he works for the government.”
    I don’t know if it was discretion that made my mother change the subject or fear of the arguments offered by this unexpected interlocutor, but the outcome was that the two of them sympathized with each other over the unpredictability of my generation and shared their nostalgic memories.In the end, by following the trail of names of mutual acquaintances, they discovered that we were doubly related through the Cotes and Iguarán lines. In those days this happened to us with two out of three people we met along the Caribbean coast, and my mother always celebrated it as an extraordinary event.
    We drove to the railroad station in a one-horse victoria, perhaps the last of a legendaryline already extinct in the rest of the world. My mother was lost in thought, looking at the arid plain calcinated by nitrate that began at the mudhole of the port and merged with the horizon. For me it was a historic spot: one day when I was three or four years old and making my first trip to Barranquilla, my grandfather had led me by the hand across that burning wasteland, walking fast and nottelling me where we were going, and then, without warning, we found ourselves facing a vast extension of green water belching foam, where an entire world of drowned chickens lay floating.
    “It’s the ocean,” he said.
    Disenchanted, I asked him what was on the other shore, and without a moment’s hesitation he answered:
    “There is no shore on the other side.”
    Today, after seeing so many oceans frontand back, I stillthink that was one of his great responses. In any case, none of my earlier images of the ocean corresponded to that sordid mass of water with its nitrate-encrusted beach where the tangled branches of rotting mangroves and sharp fragments of shell made it impossible to walk. It was horrible.
    My mother must have had the same opinion of the ocean at Ciénaga, for as soon as shesaw it appear to the left of the carriage, she said with a sigh:
    “There’s no ocean like the one at Riohacha.”
    On that occasion I told her my memory of the drowned chickens, and like all adults, she thought it was a childhood hallucination.